Killer Behind a Badge

The psychiatrist who interviewed Antoinette Frank for the New Orleans Police Department said she was too emotionally unstable to become a police officer. He was right, but she was hired anyway. She proved to be a lousy cop and then she turned killer.

When Chau Vu saw the battered red and white Ford Torino pull into the parking lot of her family's restaurant for the third time that night – this time just before 2 a.m. – she knew something bad was going to happen. "I just had a feeling," Chau said later. "...inside, something told me it was not right."

The driver of the Torino was 24-year-old Antoinette Frank, an off-duty New Orleans police officer, who sometimes worked a uniformed, extra-duty security detail at the restaurant.

Friday night's business had been slow, and in the early hours of this cool and drizzly Saturday morning, March 4, 1995, Chau's mother had already left, leaving Chau, her older sister, and two teenage brothers to clean up the Kim Anh Vietnamese restaurant on the eastern edge of New Orleans, just a couple of miles from Lake Pontchartrain.

Dressed in a leather jacket, green blouse, and black jeans, Frank tugged on the glass door. She wanted to get in, but the door was locked. Frank had already been to the restaurant twice since her patrol shift ended at 11 p.m. On her second trip she'd brought someone she introduced as her nephew, 18-year-old Rogers LaCaze. Although LaCaze stood just 5-foot-2 and weighed 135 pounds, his mouthful of gold teeth and his attitude frightened Chau. She didn't like him.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998. Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: Read More